CAN THE WORLD FIT IN A PHOTOGRAPH? CONVERSATION WITH 4 AND 5 YEAR OLDS ABOUT UNREPEATABLE EVENTS AND THEIR ENUNCIATION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHIC RECORDS
Early Childhood Education; Everyday Life; Surplus of Vision
This research presents work carried out in line with the scientific rigor of research with children to compose a Master's dissertation for the Postgraduate Program in Education, Contemporary Contexts, and Popular Demands at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro. The research is theoretically and methodologically based on Bakhtin (2013), who proposes the inseparability of the three spheres of culture: art, life, and science, and on Barthes (1984), who studies the meaning and significance of the image through photography and provides us with valuable observations on technical characteristics, his relationship and experience with photography through his narratives, categorizing them into two fields: Studium and Punctum. The aim of this dissertation is to understand how children enunciate unrepeatable events through conversation in a horizontalized perspective of discourse, and their photographic records as a surplus of vision. The choice of photographs refers to how the captured image can demonstrate an interest in the details of the world around us that go unnoticed by the inattentive and in the dialogical relationship between the subjects and the elements of nature, their context, and relationships in everyday school life. Children see the world from a different perspective and enunciate it through language. What meanings do these details represent in their process of constructing knowledge about the world? The research is woven from these statements and photographic records as the surplus vision of those who observe responsively, with children also being authors within this research. Just as Manoel de Barros recalls his childhood in his poems based on "uninteresting" elements, the discovery of these elements by children in Early Childhood Education is what interests me. The choice is for the narrative genre as a potential ethical, aesthetic, and moral choice for conducting human science with childhood in a horizontal relationship of dialogue based on the multiple voices that constitute them from a perspective of otherness, and conversation as a methodological choice for researching with the subjects. The study was carried out in a municipal school in Rio de Janeiro, located in the western part of the city. Paraphrasing Barros (2015), I am a seeker of childhood finds. Photography and narrative research are the ways in which I place myself responsively, ethically, and aesthetically in qualitative research and unite the three fields of human culture that Bakhtin talks about: art, life, and science intertwined so that, when isolated, they are not mechanical.